Mathieu Young/FoxAmelie Lowe, from Butler, takes the stage next week in Los Angeles as one of the top 20 contestants on "So You Think You Can Dance."

Powering across a New York stage, Amelia Lowe was all white legs and sleek bob haircut in a high-waisted black dance skirt, the corners of her eyes drawn up and out with liner. If she put on a bell-shaped cloche hat, she could pass for 1920s silent film star Louise Brooks.

The measured, regal vibrato of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” played as Lowe dashed around in a floral camisole, her short, dark locks framing a pale complexion.

“Adorable,” one judge sighed before Lowe even began her contemporary dance routine.

Soon, all three of the judges couldn’t contain themselves, bellowing “ahs” and “ohs” before Lowe finished with a queenly hand gesture to the sky, as if to say — with a wink — “ta-da!”

“We should do your audition in black and white, really, shouldn’t we?” he said, asking her if she’d seen the recent Oscar-winning film “The Artist,” a tribute to the silent film era.

Of course, she had.

“I just am so fascinated by that whole flapper era and I love watching silent films,” Lowe, 18, told the judges. The heroines, damsels in distress, the melodrama. But most of all, “They’re so much like dancers,” she said. “They aren’t allowed to talk, but they still have to get a message across.”

The “So You Think You Can Dance” hopeful is among 20 — 10 women and 10 men — who made the latest cut on the series, which last taped in Las Vegas and now moves to Los Angeles. Starting next week, she will dance live in front of America for a shot at the championship. Lowe, who lives in Butler, has the distinction of not only being the only New Jerseyan, but also being the only dancer from the tri-state area in the top group.

“You’re a proper little character already, aren’t you?” Lythgoe — also the show’s producer — asked Lowe, obviously amused by her vintage flair, one that the show’s producers milked by offering a scratchy black-and-white montage of Lowe’s backstory before the judges informed her they’d be sending her on to the next round. “Vegas!” announced some old-fashioned font on screen, in the style of a silent movie. “I made it!”

Lowe’s interest in the 1920s, especially through film, wasn’t inspired by “The Artist,” but started as she entered high school, at the Academy for Visual and Performing Arts in Denville. She just graduated, though because of her involvement with the competition, she wasn’t around for the ceremony.

“I got my diploma mailed to me,” she says. “It was fine.”

Her song selection for the audition that wowed the judges, the Piaf song, translates from French as “No, I have no regrets.” It’s the story she wanted to tell with her movements, she says. They are powerful yet carefree — a leg leading the way, and arm pulling back — no inkling of distress ever invading her expression, fixed in a triumphant smile.

Before making it to the televised talent competition, Lowe taught ballet and choreographed routines at the Dance Academy of North Jersey in Lake Hopatcong.

“She’s a very, very committed dancer,” says Howard Luks, who owns the studio with his wife, Elaine. “She’s been taking ballet four, five days a week ... forever.” Because he knew Lowe would make it past the show’s New York auditions to Las Vegas, he began to look for a replacement.

Dancing since she was 3 years old, Lowe started to call the pursuit a serious one a few years later, about the same time she began watching “So You Think You Can Dance.” The talent competition series premiered on Fox in 2005.

Lowe studies at Giselle Ballet Academy in Ho-Ho-Kus, and has worked with the same teacher since she was 9.

“Kind of like what you see on ‘Dance Moms’ but not nearly as intense with the parents,” Lowe says. Her mother is not much of a stage mom, Lowe says, but also danced when she was younger, as did Lowe’s grandmother, for the U.S. Army during World War II. Her grandmother is tickled by her embrace of flapper style, Lowe says, although the contemporary movements are a far shot from her classical background.

Lowe sees her modern style as reverent of ballet: “I get a lot of inspiration from my ballet teacher, who is very strict Russian ballet.”

Buster Keaton is her favorite silent film star, especially in the 1925 comedy “Seven Chances,” about a man who must marry by day’s end in order to secure his inheritance.

Her favorite dancer? A force who came to prominence in the 1940s: Gene Kelly.

“He was a genius,” she says. He was “super entertaining, and on top of that, did his own choreography.”

That, says Lowe, is her own goal, having choreographed her audition routine and other performances for the show, in addition to editing about 17 of her own dance reels and videos for YouTube. If she does end up going to college, she wants to pursue a film degree.

Lowe hopes the words “Choreography by Amelia Lowe” figure prominently in her future, she says. “I’ve got more in me than just the little silent film flapper girl.”